Next week is the Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society. This year it is being held in Morocco by scientists from Hassan II University of Casablanca. All of us in the Museum’s meteorite research team are heading out to Casablanca on Sunday for a week of presentations, discussions, networking and a great chance to explore some of Morocco.

The Moroccan Atlas Mountains. A great place to go meteorite hunting! (Image credit: E. Vaccaro)

Many meteorites have been found in Morocco, including the Martian meteorite Tissint, so this is a very appropriate place for hundreds of meteorite-lovers to convene (the organisers have even named the conference meeting rooms after meteorites!).

Morocco has an abundance of meteorites because it is largely desert, and deserts are excellent places to look for odd, dark coloured rocks from space. Most of the meteorites found in this region are given the designation NWA (for North West Africa) as it is not always known exactly where they fell before they were passed on to collectors and institutions by meteorite dealers.

Museum scientist Dr Caroline Smith holds the Tissint meteorite. It is now the largest Martian meteorite in the Natural History Museum collections.

Hello! I’m Jenny, a research scientist studying meteorites at the Natural History Museum. My work focuses on the timing of heating events in the early solar system, but more on that another time…

I’m part of a group of researchers, curators and PhD students who study meteorites and other extraterrestrial materials in the Museum’s Earth Sciences department. We study these rocks – using various laboratory techniques – so that we can better understand the formation of the solar system.

The Museum is a great place to carry out this research as its meteorite collection is one of the finest in the world; containing almost 5,000 pieces of 2,000 individual meteorites. Most of these come from asteroids, but we also have meteorites from the Moon and Mars. Our collection also includes objects formed during meteorites impacts.

We’ve decided to start this blog so that we can communicate our research to you and provide a more in depth look at the Museum’s meteorite collection. As it’s our first post I’ll give a few examples of why our research matters and how it gives important insights into the world and space around us.

The solar system formed about four and a half billion years ago. We know this from studying meteorites like this one, called Allende. It contains a component that is rich in calcium and aluminium (called calcium-aluminium inclusions or CAIs). These CAIs are the oldest solar system materials.

This is a stone from the Allende meteorite. The white part is a calcium aluminium inclusion (we call them CAIs). These CAIs are thought to be the first solid material to form in the solar system.

There has not been a sample return mission to Mars yet so, for now, the only pieces of Mars available for scientific study on Earth are meteorites. These meteorites help us understand the volcanic processes that occurred on another planet. We are lucky enough to have a large (1.1 kg) piece of a martian meteorite called Tissint on display in the Vault gallery.

The largest piece of the martian meteorite, Tissint. We keep it in a container called a dessicator to protect it from Earth's environment.

Meteorites contain a lot of water! You might think that asteroids are very dry objects, but in some meteorites up to 20% of their weight is made up of water. These meteorites are called carbonaceous chondrites as they contain organic carbon – this also makes them look very black in colour, as you can see in the photo of the Ivuna meteorite, below. Their chemical composition is very similar to the Sun, which means they preserve the most primitive solar system materials, unchanged for over four and a half billion years.

This is a piece of the Ivuna meteorite. It looks very dark, almost black, because it contains a lot of carbon.

I hope you found that information interesting! I, along with the rest of the meteorite group, will use this blog to tell you more about our collection. We will also write about our individual research (what we hope to achieve, what lab techniques we use, conferences we attend), the curation of meteorites and our outreach activities. Check back soon for more!